Free Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall by Will Self Page A

deceptively yielding pavé of the bay (and, believe me, like all suicides, I knew just how hard the impact would be, foresaw entirely the Faroese slaughter of my expiration: a small pink whale gashed open and wallowing in a cloudy red stain), I also anticipated feeling this consolation: that I had cast the beastly Barbour aside, and so was meeting my fate
without any baggage at all
, no plasticized Beethoven, no paperback
Great Expectations
, no rolled-up plastic trousers, no waxed cotton class suit; I was going to my execution as every baby-boomer should: in a T-shirt and Levis, bravely refusing Ray-Bans.
    So it was with a sense of fretful – almost pettish – annoyance that I realized Death was bopping me on the head without any more ado, that my extinction, far from being profoundly protracted, was to have all the grand tragedy of a prankster creeping up behind me and suddenly yanking down the woolly hat I’d forgotten I was sporting, so that I was entombed in a tickly darkness – for all eternity.
    I came to in a large poorly lit room notable for a tacky earthenware statue of the Buddha on a low table. This Gautama had an expression not so much spiritual as obscurely self-satisfied, while the joss sticks set before him curdled brown smoke into the gloom. Around me shuffled the shades, all dressed in floppy shirts and baggy pants of faun, umber and other earthy tones, which looked to be woven from flax, or hemp, or some other retro-fibre.
    My groan hearkened one of these souls to me; he or she was suitably inter-sex, with sepia hair scraped into a mule tail and circular wire-rimmed spectacles. ‘Would you like an urbal tea?’ he or she asked gently. ‘We’ve got most varieties, cardamom, caraway seed, ginger?’

    ‘Whatever,’ I pleaded, and he or she footed soundlessly away.
    A lissom man, with a sandy trowel-shaped beard and the tense look of someone who practises yoga furiously, mounted the low platform behind the Buddha and concertinaed into a full lotus as easily as I might’ve scratched my arse (when alive). Despite my recent death I could sense the aggression radiating from this man, and as he picked up a small brass mallet and tapped a bell his mild features writhed with barely repressed fury.
    I was remarkably unfazed.
    ‘For our dharma discussion today,’ announced the sandy Sangha, ‘I will be taking suggestions; anything you wish guidance on I am happy to consider—’
    ‘It’s vervain,’ said the shade, pressing a tepid mug into my hand. ‘Enjoy.’
    Remarkably unfazed because this all seemed altogether just: that the Tibetan Buddhist cosmology should turn out to be correct and that my own bardo should – at least initially – take the form of a room full of the angriest people in the world: occidental Buddhists. Of course, what would begin to happen when my ego started to disintegrate I shuddered to think; presumably in place of the multi-headed demons that tormented Tibetans I’d be visited with my own bogeybeings; perhaps the fibrous Buddhists would transmogrify into giant Bionicles, those weirdly skeletal robotic toys loved by my youngest child that had techno-scimitars and laser guns for arms, and could be posed on their long legs so as to delve surgically in their victims’ innards.
    ‘Drug addiction and the dharma,’ offered one seeker. ‘Dharma and movement practice,’ said a second. ‘The threepearls,’ a third in lotus position said, his thick glasses like an insect’s compound eyes.
    ‘OK, OK,’ the Sangha snorted. ‘That’s enough – we could go on all night taking suggestions and have no time for instruction.’
    The seekers tittered obsequiously, while behind the Sangha’s enlightened head I could see the dark ballooning of a massive and unconstrained ego.
    ‘I’m, I’m ...’ I grasped the wrist of the exiguous urbalist who had coiled into the canvas chair beside me, ‘not dead, am I?’
    ‘Heavens no,’ s/he relied in a beige undertone. ‘You poor man,